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flowrs4opheliaOMGSWTFBSG. Oh hell yes. This is happening. I've had a Battlestar Galactica fan made out of me in a pretty short time, and after paying attention to almost nothing but Twilight fandom for several months I think it will be nice to hang around another one in which I don't just respect the writer/creators but am kind of in awe of them and most of the discussion and debates aren't just going to be about ships.
I have a habit of getting into shows really late, which is why I've never been able to post reactions to episodes as they air like I'm sure to write a review of every new Harry Potter movie or the next Twilight book. But that's going to start as soon as I get caught up and can start watching new episodes of this. So I thought I might as well preview that with my reaction to everything from before then. This will probably be followed with a post talking about season 3 as well as all of the season 4 episodes so far as soon as I've seen them.
General non-spoilery comments on the show
So, not many of the fandoms I shower with love in this journal are shows. That's because I really don't watch many. After getting into one series after another that always turned into aimless crap after a while that the producers were obviously keeping going only for the purpose of keeping going, I've developed a sort of cynical aversion to the whole medium. But thank hell I discovered that Galactica is practically the opposite of everything I tend to hate that TV shows are.
This series may have spoiled all other science fiction for me now as well as set the standard for all television that I suppose I didn't know I already had because of my picky preferences. I don't know if I'll ever be able to take Star Trek that seriously again now that I've seen how well BSG maintains a feeling of realism, sometimes uncomfortably, with every aspect from the way it's shot to the careful attention to detail and consistency. Never on Voyager would a character who breaks their knee in one episode still be in sick bay with a broken knee in the next episode to be showed for a moment watching silently when a new catastrophe brings more injured characters in there to be treated. The setting is a world that has widely colonized outer space yet isn't so advanced it's alienating; you don't see cutely compact electronic devices and everyone still uses paper. Everyone in the cast is incredibly talented and performs like they don't know they're in a sci-fi show with robots.
I could probably go on and on about why I continuously feel like this series is too good to be true when I'm watching it. It's fun in the typical fantasy/science-fiction way yet not really escapism. It's deep. It often seems like every kind of idea proposed that would have most producers asking themselves, "Could we get away with that?" was brought up and had these ones just say, "Why not?" They take risks and do extremely unconventional things and make it work. This would not be an easy show to jump in on at any random point. It challenges you a little, and also lets you be comfortable with being a little confused along with the characters and not having all the answers yet, which is something I don't think television does that often.
Everything else I have to say with SPOILERS OF SEASON II
If I had to pick, my top 10 favorite episodes so far
10) The Hand of God (Just because the whole ending was such an obvious and fun homage to Star Wars, which would just look silly in a show that's actually trying to be SW instead of doing its own unique and insane thing all the time)
9) Final Cut
8) Kobol's Last Gleaming (The first part has the most awesome opening EVAR)
7) Scar
6) Flight of the Phoenix
5) Downloaded
4) You Can't Go Home Again
3) Colonial Day (a.k.a. the episode in which Lee realizes that Kara is a woman. And also they kind of play "good cop bad cop" in the interrogation room looking like they do this kind of thing together every day. ROFL.)
2) Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down (I'm glad they tried the comedy farce thing in an episode before the show went from really dark to darker beyond belief)
1) Resurrection Ship
How about parts of it I haven't liked?
1) Let me just talk about how kind of hilariously bad episode 2x14 is. As soon as I was done watching "Black Market" my first thought was that this is probably the kind of episode fandom likes to pretend never happened because they'd rather not acknowledge information it gives that just isn't very good writing. Everything about this episode is so cliche. The flashbacks go for cinematic and dramatic a little ridiculously when this show is usually so nicely understated. I found it hard to accept such a big revelation about Lee's past that was suddenly brought up this late in the show. And I could live with the character of shiny, honorable Lee being tainted because it turns out he's seeing a hooker if it wasn't a kind of unattractive hooker with a name like Shevonne. LOL. And if anything revealed in this episode felt consistent with events in the rest of the show at all or were ever going to be brought up again.
2) I love Billy to death and if I really had to watch him die, I think maybe it could have been done in a better way. I guess you have to do the best you can to make it work in the story somehow when an actor wants to leave a show, but it was a little obvious that they just needed to kill him for some reason. The way it was handled with just happening at the end of an episode and then being over and done with made me not like Dee much because she didn't seem that affected by it, which I think was not the writers' intention at all and just an inconvenient effect of something they had to write in but didn't want to have to develop and dwell on too much in the following episodes. The scene with Roslin having to look at him and then fixing his hair was so epically sad, though. That kind of redeems everything.
Characters
I love Starbuck, Adama, Apollo, Roslin, Helo, Billy, Hot Dog, and Doc Coddle.
I like Six, Tyrol, Sharon, Gaeta, and Anders.
I am indifferent to Boomer, Cally, Dee, and Baltar.
I have a love/hate relationship with Tigh.
I dislike Ellen, Three, and Zarek.
I hate Kat.
Ships. Yes.
Helo/Sharon is too adorable.
Chief/Boomer is very unfortunate.
Gaius/Six is endlessly interesting and surprising.
Billy/Dee was a good thing. Sigh.
Kara/Sam is kind of cute. Go Buccaneers.
Lee/Dee is totally random and boring and gives me a bad taste in my mouth.
Adama/Roslin are always freaking amazing together no matter what they're doing in the same room.
Lee/Kara. Ummm yeah. This ship is torture. This ship is it. OTP forever.
Someone needs to tell me I'm giving this too much thought...
You don't see many TV shows that invite detailed analysis and philosophical or speculative conversations as much as this one. I think one of the biggest reasons this series works so well for me is that you can almost always feel that it is going somewhere and that everything means something and is ultimately important. Because so many episodes tease you with hints of things that are to come and are built around the same continuously developing threads, I've learned to trust that the story really does need to happen the way it's happening even when it's going in directions that are strange or kind of hard to watch. It absolutely never seems like the writers have started to make everything up as they go along; at least in part, you can see there must already be an ending to all of this chosen.
When the approach to the writing asks to be taken this seriously and seems full of possible foreshadowing, I can't help but dissect and analyze everything ridiculously. I wonder if it's intentional that in the episode called "Scar," which deals a lot with the characters feeling like they have no futures (and in a cut scene specifically discussing never having children), there's a scene in which we noticeably see Kara's scar for the first time since the farm episode. Or if it means anything that the second part of the episode called "The Resurrection Ship" opens with the image of Lee floating on water in a crucifixion position. When I first watched the miniseries with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ninety6tears, there was one point after learning how many colonies there are that I stated the assumption, "Oh, so is there a Cylon model for every colony?" She was just like "Um...No" but later we realized that the number twelve does seem to keep being important in BSG (Roslin also sees the vision of twelve serpents representing twelve Viper fighters). Also, I'm even pretty sure that it's a little symbolic that the picture of Lee that Dee has in her locker is cut from a bigger picture and is missing Kara and Zak, but that's my shipperness talking. LOL.
It hurts us :(
Nobody told me this show could be so sad. In the end of season 2.0 and beginning of 2.5 I reached a point where all these things starting making me cry. It started with when I saw they named the new fighter they built Laura. Then I know there was some scene with Gaius and Gina that had me off again, which was the most surprising because you just shouldn't care about anything involving Gaius. LOL. And then when I got to the part that Helo and Sharon tearfully see each other again after he and Tyrol were going to be executed, which follows Lee admitting to Kara that there was a moment he just wanted to die when he was ejected from his fighter, I kind of lost it a little. :'(
Basically.....love love love. I don't even know how long I'll last trying to hang around many fandom comms for this show because the definition of "fandom" can sometime be defined as "little shits who like to complain a lot." Ha, you know it's true. In some fandoms I laugh at or participate in the bitching and complaining, but I don't think I would have the stomach for much bashing and bitterness related to this series. I say this knowing Lee/Kara may very well be an ultimately doomed ship, which I already know would crush me as hard as Jacob/Bella, and some characters I really love might get killed off before the end because this story just seems like that kind of myth. But if any of you do actually have anything to tell me that I need to know if I'm going to explore the BSG fan territory such as "OMG you have to join us in this community" or "OMG this person writes the best fic," do tell so I have something to check out once I'm spoiler-safe. :)
I have a habit of getting into shows really late, which is why I've never been able to post reactions to episodes as they air like I'm sure to write a review of every new Harry Potter movie or the next Twilight book. But that's going to start as soon as I get caught up and can start watching new episodes of this. So I thought I might as well preview that with my reaction to everything from before then. This will probably be followed with a post talking about season 3 as well as all of the season 4 episodes so far as soon as I've seen them.
So, not many of the fandoms I shower with love in this journal are shows. That's because I really don't watch many. After getting into one series after another that always turned into aimless crap after a while that the producers were obviously keeping going only for the purpose of keeping going, I've developed a sort of cynical aversion to the whole medium. But thank hell I discovered that Galactica is practically the opposite of everything I tend to hate that TV shows are.
This series may have spoiled all other science fiction for me now as well as set the standard for all television that I suppose I didn't know I already had because of my picky preferences. I don't know if I'll ever be able to take Star Trek that seriously again now that I've seen how well BSG maintains a feeling of realism, sometimes uncomfortably, with every aspect from the way it's shot to the careful attention to detail and consistency. Never on Voyager would a character who breaks their knee in one episode still be in sick bay with a broken knee in the next episode to be showed for a moment watching silently when a new catastrophe brings more injured characters in there to be treated. The setting is a world that has widely colonized outer space yet isn't so advanced it's alienating; you don't see cutely compact electronic devices and everyone still uses paper. Everyone in the cast is incredibly talented and performs like they don't know they're in a sci-fi show with robots.
I could probably go on and on about why I continuously feel like this series is too good to be true when I'm watching it. It's fun in the typical fantasy/science-fiction way yet not really escapism. It's deep. It often seems like every kind of idea proposed that would have most producers asking themselves, "Could we get away with that?" was brought up and had these ones just say, "Why not?" They take risks and do extremely unconventional things and make it work. This would not be an easy show to jump in on at any random point. It challenges you a little, and also lets you be comfortable with being a little confused along with the characters and not having all the answers yet, which is something I don't think television does that often.
If I had to pick, my top 10 favorite episodes so far
10) The Hand of God (Just because the whole ending was such an obvious and fun homage to Star Wars, which would just look silly in a show that's actually trying to be SW instead of doing its own unique and insane thing all the time)
9) Final Cut
8) Kobol's Last Gleaming (The first part has the most awesome opening EVAR)
7) Scar
6) Flight of the Phoenix
5) Downloaded
4) You Can't Go Home Again
3) Colonial Day (a.k.a. the episode in which Lee realizes that Kara is a woman. And also they kind of play "good cop bad cop" in the interrogation room looking like they do this kind of thing together every day. ROFL.)
2) Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down (I'm glad they tried the comedy farce thing in an episode before the show went from really dark to darker beyond belief)
1) Resurrection Ship
How about parts of it I haven't liked?
1) Let me just talk about how kind of hilariously bad episode 2x14 is. As soon as I was done watching "Black Market" my first thought was that this is probably the kind of episode fandom likes to pretend never happened because they'd rather not acknowledge information it gives that just isn't very good writing. Everything about this episode is so cliche. The flashbacks go for cinematic and dramatic a little ridiculously when this show is usually so nicely understated. I found it hard to accept such a big revelation about Lee's past that was suddenly brought up this late in the show. And I could live with the character of shiny, honorable Lee being tainted because it turns out he's seeing a hooker if it wasn't a kind of unattractive hooker with a name like Shevonne. LOL. And if anything revealed in this episode felt consistent with events in the rest of the show at all or were ever going to be brought up again.
2) I love Billy to death and if I really had to watch him die, I think maybe it could have been done in a better way. I guess you have to do the best you can to make it work in the story somehow when an actor wants to leave a show, but it was a little obvious that they just needed to kill him for some reason. The way it was handled with just happening at the end of an episode and then being over and done with made me not like Dee much because she didn't seem that affected by it, which I think was not the writers' intention at all and just an inconvenient effect of something they had to write in but didn't want to have to develop and dwell on too much in the following episodes. The scene with Roslin having to look at him and then fixing his hair was so epically sad, though. That kind of redeems everything.
Characters
I love Starbuck, Adama, Apollo, Roslin, Helo, Billy, Hot Dog, and Doc Coddle.
I like Six, Tyrol, Sharon, Gaeta, and Anders.
I am indifferent to Boomer, Cally, Dee, and Baltar.
I have a love/hate relationship with Tigh.
I dislike Ellen, Three, and Zarek.
I hate Kat.
Ships. Yes.
Helo/Sharon is too adorable.
Chief/Boomer is very unfortunate.
Gaius/Six is endlessly interesting and surprising.
Billy/Dee was a good thing. Sigh.
Kara/Sam is kind of cute. Go Buccaneers.
Lee/Dee is totally random and boring and gives me a bad taste in my mouth.
Adama/Roslin are always freaking amazing together no matter what they're doing in the same room.
Lee/Kara. Ummm yeah. This ship is torture. This ship is it. OTP forever.
Someone needs to tell me I'm giving this too much thought...
You don't see many TV shows that invite detailed analysis and philosophical or speculative conversations as much as this one. I think one of the biggest reasons this series works so well for me is that you can almost always feel that it is going somewhere and that everything means something and is ultimately important. Because so many episodes tease you with hints of things that are to come and are built around the same continuously developing threads, I've learned to trust that the story really does need to happen the way it's happening even when it's going in directions that are strange or kind of hard to watch. It absolutely never seems like the writers have started to make everything up as they go along; at least in part, you can see there must already be an ending to all of this chosen.
When the approach to the writing asks to be taken this seriously and seems full of possible foreshadowing, I can't help but dissect and analyze everything ridiculously. I wonder if it's intentional that in the episode called "Scar," which deals a lot with the characters feeling like they have no futures (and in a cut scene specifically discussing never having children), there's a scene in which we noticeably see Kara's scar for the first time since the farm episode. Or if it means anything that the second part of the episode called "The Resurrection Ship" opens with the image of Lee floating on water in a crucifixion position. When I first watched the miniseries with
ninety6tears, there was one point after learning how many colonies there are that I stated the assumption, "Oh, so is there a Cylon model for every colony?" She was just like "Um...No" but later we realized that the number twelve does seem to keep being important in BSG (Roslin also sees the vision of twelve serpents representing twelve Viper fighters). Also, I'm even pretty sure that it's a little symbolic that the picture of Lee that Dee has in her locker is cut from a bigger picture and is missing Kara and Zak, but that's my shipperness talking. LOL.It hurts us :(
Nobody told me this show could be so sad. In the end of season 2.0 and beginning of 2.5 I reached a point where all these things starting making me cry. It started with when I saw they named the new fighter they built Laura. Then I know there was some scene with Gaius and Gina that had me off again, which was the most surprising because you just shouldn't care about anything involving Gaius. LOL. And then when I got to the part that Helo and Sharon tearfully see each other again after he and Tyrol were going to be executed, which follows Lee admitting to Kara that there was a moment he just wanted to die when he was ejected from his fighter, I kind of lost it a little. :'(
Basically.....love love love. I don't even know how long I'll last trying to hang around many fandom comms for this show because the definition of "fandom" can sometime be defined as "little shits who like to complain a lot." Ha, you know it's true. In some fandoms I laugh at or participate in the bitching and complaining, but I don't think I would have the stomach for much bashing and bitterness related to this series. I say this knowing Lee/Kara may very well be an ultimately doomed ship, which I already know would crush me as hard as Jacob/Bella, and some characters I really love might get killed off before the end because this story just seems like that kind of myth. But if any of you do actually have anything to tell me that I need to know if I'm going to explore the BSG fan territory such as "OMG you have to join us in this community" or "OMG this person writes the best fic," do tell so I have something to check out once I'm spoiler-safe. :)
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-25 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-25 06:13 pm (UTC)Man, okay. One time a couple weeks ago when Bek and Marita were visiting and a bunch of people were hanging out at Shep's, we were watching an episode and Kitty made some comment like, "How long are they going to show us this guy shaving?" But that's what I fucking love about this show, the verisimilitude. We know what the bathrooms look like, we know what the food looks like, we get to meet the people who fix stuff and mine for fuel. I really don't want to agree that BSG has ruined any other sci-fi for me, but as much as I love Star Trek, it makes ST look like Teen Titans or something.
God damn, I need to watch Resurrection Ship again.
And I could live with the character of shiny, honorable Lee being tainted because it turns out he's seeing a hooker if it wasn't a kind of unattractive hooker with a name like Shevonne. Yeah, that still makes me LMAO.
It often seems like every kind of idea proposed that would have most producers asking themselves, "Could we get away with that?" was brought up and had these ones just say, "Why not?" YEEEAAH!
I like that "Sharon" is on the like list and Boomer is not. I have to agree. The two seem to have completely different personalities after a while. And OMG, I HATE THE THREES. SO FRAKING OBNOXIOUS.
And your character list is missing Leoben, a very controversial one.
In general you would find the fandom agreeable. The opinions are extremely varied about pretty much everything, not just ships, so somebody will always agree with you and everybody else won't get aggressive.
And if you wanted you could post a link to this in
no subject
Date: 2008-04-25 06:44 pm (UTC)And OMG, I HATE THE THREES. SO FRAKING OBNOXIOUS.
But how hilarious is the "God loves me!" part in "Downloaded"? HAHAHA. That had to be intentionally funny.
I'm just so confused about Leoben. Are all of those models named Leoben or did the Leoben in "Flesh and Bone" actually get resurrected and is the exact same one who's playing house with Kara later in S3?
We are so watching Resurrection Ship again together. And Flight of the Phoenix. These are my demands.
I WANT BOXING NOW. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO BUY ME?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-27 09:00 pm (UTC)Yeah, that part makes me laugh. As well as her wanting to eat babies.